Technology and Culture

Thomas J. Misa

For many years historians of technology have been arguing that technology needs to be understood in a contextual and historical framework, situated within ongoing social and political processes; above all, that it is not to be understood as an exogenous force with outside impacts. This message is beginning to seep into mainstream historical discourse. Geoffrey Herrera’s bold and appealing Technology and International Transformation{1} suggests that it is resonating as well with international relations and political science.

Herrera starts with a solid understanding of the similarities and differences of “constructivism” in recent work in international relations and in technology studies, and he has a promising plan to bring them together. He clearly summarizes the key insights of constructivist approaches in technology studies, with their emphasis on the social forces that shape the emergence of technology and their relative disregard of the social effects of technologies. Here he is drawing on the basic insights of the contextual history of technology with appropriate citations to key works in the debates on technological determinism (including awareness of the critical literature surrounding Langdon Winner’s well-cited article on Robert Moses’s bus-blocking Long Island bridges) in international relations, by comparison, focuses on the construction and evolution of social identities and the dynamic interplay between such identities and the process of institutional change. (This point is best elaborated on page 23, and on page 217, note 45). As such it differs sharply from the prevailing “neorealist” and “neoliberal” traditions in international relations, traditions that each take the identities and interests of social actors as pre-theoretic givens, that presume rational actors, and that typically prefer quasi-static or schematic models in accounting for change. Leading authors in each of these traditions affirm some version of a technological-determinist stance which posits that “the underlying technological environment determines [sic] the nature of political authority” and that “alterations in the material forces of destruction . . . largely lie outside the control of humans” (p. 29).

Mounting his own critique of technological determinism, Herrera convincingly shows the strengths of constructivist approaches in international relations and argues that they can be augmented by “moving technology inside our theoretical conception of the international system” (p. 26). Through his extended case studies on the railroad and the atom bomb, he observes that certain technologies—mature, large technical systems in Tom Hughes’s sense—will have direct consequences for the international system, and yet that these are also products of the international system and therefore do not have one-way impacts on it. His is a flexible, interactive, contextualized, and fundamentally historical approach. “The best studies of the history of technology show how technology and politics are mutually constitutive,” he writes. “Technology is both a social product and an important independent force because it confronts actors as a real resource or impediment” (p. 7). There is obviously a lot to like here.

Herrera clearly specifies a two-part argument and carefully builds his two case studies around it. His first aim is to show that technologies developed into complex large-scale technological systems in a transnational setting, not just a local or national one, while his second aim is to show that the resulting complex technological systems “significantly altered” what he terms the “interaction capacity” of the international system. Interaction capacity is a widely used concept in international relations. The key point is that in all social systems the capacity of social actors to interact with one another, through technologies or other means, is a capacity of the system as a whole (not solely of the individual actors) and that such interaction can and does shape the nature and evolution of sociotechnical systems. Herrera suggests the (hypothetical) example of two otherwise identical international systems differing only in that communication in one depends on horses and sailing vessels and in the other on global computer networks; obviously the two international systems as well as their respective interaction capacities would differ dramatically. Since technologies are involved in altering the available means for communications, trading, transportation, and violence, they have consequences for the international system.

This mutual shaping or co-construction of international systems and complex technological systems is what Herrera aims to demonstrate with his two case studies. It is easy for him to show that the railroad system in the nineteenth century was a product of state initiatives (as well as professional engineering and private entrepreneurship) and that the atom bomb depended on the massive emigration of European physicists to the United States. It is also easy to construct a case that railroads dramatically altered the interaction capacity of the (European-centered) international system—by facilitating the effective mobilization of much larger armies, by making two-front wars feasible rather than suicidal, and by rewarding the states that were able to build and manage them as well as integrate them into military planning. Prussia looms large, with its railroad activities in the 1840s and 1850s leading to its military victories over Austria and France and its rapid industrialization after 1871. The section concludes with a survey of colonial railroads in China, India, and Africa, and the argument that they were “a necessary part of late-nineteenth-century colonial expansion” (p. 111).

Herrera’s treatment of the atomic bomb likewise proceeds in well-ordered steps. There is ample discussion of the German university system that nurtured so many of the leading atomic physicists, the Nazi-era turmoil that drove them out, and the American philanthropic foundations that brought them to the United States, where many played key roles in the Manhattan Project. And while he highlights the famous physicists, Herrera is well aware of the industrial, managerial, and technological components of the Manhattan Project such as the Tennessee Valley Authority and Du-Pont. “The bomb emerged out of this symbiosis of science, industry, government, and foreign borrowings,” he writes, “and transformed the international system” (p. 183). While few historians of technology would dispute this sensible conclusion, specialists among us will cringe at numerous errors. The assumption that there was a unitary “atom bomb” entirely trips up his discussion of the gun vs. implosion bomb designs (p. 181). Britain’s bomb work simply drops out. And while the narrative focuses squarely on the U.S. atomic bomb effort through 1945, the conclusion is that “nuclear weapons transformed the international system” (p. 120). Indeed, “nuclear” and “atomic” bombs are deployed in the text as if they were synonymous.

My hunch is that Herrera’s work will be used in two ways. Because his overall framing is so obviously attractive, historians can use his chapters for preparing lectures on technology and the international political system (easily correcting the errors). Most of us would enthusiastically embrace his argument that “technological change can induce changes in the nature and distribution of power within the [international] system, but systemic level and state level factors shape technological change” (p. 195). Teachers who are not historically grounded may even find Herrera’s core case studies adequate. But I doubt that Americanists will be satisfied with the atomic bomb chapter, or German historians with his railroad chapter (based largely on pre-1980 sources, while Colleen Dunlavy’s Politics and Industrialization: Early Railroads in the United States and Prussia [1994] receives merely a perfunctory citation). Narrative-minded readers may also be put off by Herrera’s structured style of exposition, with its “factors” and “stages” and quasi-imperative language. Still, even if it is not the final word, Technology and International Transformation deserves praise as a thoroughly interdisciplinary and theoretically minded effort to bring international relations REVIEWS into dialogue with the history of technology.

{1}Geoffrey L. Herrera, Technology and International Transformation: The Railroad, the Atom Bomb, and the Politics of Technological Change (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006, pp. ix+265, $65).

Dr. Misa directs the University of Minnesota’s Charles Babbage Institute. His coedited volume, with Mikael Hård, Urban Machinery: Inside Modern European Cities, is forthcoming from the MIT Press in 2008.

Copyright© 2008, the Society for the History of Technology